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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
Wayne A. Houlberg, Robert W. Conn
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 64 | Number 1 | September 1977 | Pages 141-150
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE77-A27085
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Research on the development of numerical techniques to simulate the space-time evolution of large tokamak plasmas is reported. A nonuniform spatial mesh technique is employed to allow more accurate calculations in the boundary of reactor-size plasmas. A box integration method is used to maintain the accuracy of central differencing on the nonuniform spatial mesh and to preserve both the particle and energy flux. A variable implicit technique is used for the time expansion. The time-centered (Crank-Nicholson) technique used in most other models generally offers greater accuracy but can lead to severe limitations on the time step. Somewhat more implicit treatments can remove the numerical limitations on the time step without seriously affecting accuracy. The physical time scales, which can change by several orders of magnitude from startup to equilibrium, can then be used to continually adjust the time step throughout a calculation. Sample calculations are presented for a near-term tokamak engineering test reactor and a conceptual tokamak power reactor, UWMAK-III.